President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Thursday that in the package of reforms that he will present on February 5, he will propose to eliminate “all” the autonomous bodies that exist in the country.
“We are also reviewing with a magnifying glass what these agencies do, to the point that I am going to propose in the package of reform initiatives, that all these agencies that were created to protect private individuals disappear,” the president said during his morning press conference.
López Obrador responded in this way to the statements of the president of the Federal Economic Competition Commission (Cofece), Andrea Marván, about the exhaustive review that this agency will carry out on the sale of 13 plants of the Spanish Iberdrola to the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) last June.
Among the agencies he has criticized are the Cofece, the Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT), the National Institute of Transparency and Access to Information (Inai), and the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE).
López Obrador affirmed that all the autonomous regulators were created in what he calls the neoliberal period “to affect the public interest”.
And he maintained that during that stage the goods “of the people” and of the nation were handed over to private individuals.
“There was a privatization that only came as a precedent in history that was carried out by (the dictator) Porfirio Díaz, he handed over the oil, the mines, the lands, the water, the railways, the banks to foreigners,” he pointed out.
He indicated that his package of initiatives seeks to modify the reforms made in the last 36 years to favor only private individuals and asserted that that is why the agencies “supposedly” autonomous were created.
“They needed to protect themselves and that is why they constituted all these agencies, supposedly autonomous, where the private, the particular, has more weight than the public, that is why the attitude of this agency (Cofece),” he concluded.
Last Tuesday, López Obrador revealed that the package of constitutional reforms that he will present on February 5 amounts to 10 initiatives, among which he will include those of the Judicial Power, the National Guard and republican austerity.
In addition to the fact that in previous events he has expressed that he will also seek an electrical initiative to counteract the reform that opened the energy sector to private investment in the six-year term of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018).
Since last Thursday, the president announced the last package of constitutional initiatives before the elections of June 2 and to conclude his term in October next year.
López Obrador expressed his hope that his alliance of parties will recover the two-thirds majority of Congress that is required to modify the constitution and that he lost in the midterm elections of 2021.
Source: Forbes
